


The Light on the Water (Non-Explicit Version)

by basilique



Category: His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman, Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Adventure, Crossover, Daemon Touching, Daemons, Falling In Love, Lyra's world, M/M, Magic, Missionary Michele Crispino, Muslim Otabek Altin, Nun Sara Crispino, POV Otabek Altin, Prince Victor Nikiforov, Religion, Rituals, Shaman Otabek, Spectre hunting, Spectres, VictUuri, Witch Katsuki Yuuri, Worldbuilding, meryuri, otayuri - Freeform, researched fic, traveling between worlds
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-10-03
Updated: 2018-11-10
Packaged: 2019-01-08 10:14:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 11
Words: 13,405
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12252312
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/basilique/pseuds/basilique
Summary: Warrior-Shaman Otabek Altin books passage on a Siberian research vessel bound for Svalbard.He is searching for the great gate between the worlds in the aurora. His goal is simple: travel to Citagazee and kill as many spectres as he can before they kill him.But when he finds a beautiful merman stranded on the ice, Otabek is forced to call all of his plans into question.





	1. What the Spirit Does Alone

**Author's Note:**

> More coming soon! =D
> 
> If you would like to read the Explicit version (eventual Otayuri and Victuuri smut), it's available here:
> 
> http://archiveofourown.org/works/12027105/chapters/27248553
> 
> :))

Otabek crouches down in the snow and presses his forehead to his daemon’s.

Pasha is breathing hard, and quivering. Otabek strokes the back of her neck, smoothing down the hairs that stand up sharply in her anguish.

“It’s going to hurt us.” Her voice is low.

"I know," he says, "but we must do it anyway. You know why. And we’ll only go a little further than we did last time. Only a yard or two further."

She growls and butts her forehead harder against his.

Otabek does not want her to go either. They are both acutely aware of the churn of nausea, the unending jolt of dread that comes with the mere suggestion of separation. But they are steely, too. And more determined than any other soul who has ever crossed this biting tundra.

“Once, now,” Otabek says gently. “And come back when you can’t bear it anymore.”

With another little growl, she turns away. She tears her eyes from his with love, and tenderness, and defiance all at once.

She charges away across the snow. Her gentle husky’s feet leave prints in the fresh snowfall, and her smoky coat shines in the clear arctic sunlight.

He knows she will go far; too far for both of them. Now that she has set her mind to the task, she wants to do better than well. She wants to impress him. She loves that. But Otabek’s heart tugs with a familiar sickliness as she disappears behind a blank drift of snow.

He tightens his jaw. He breathes in through his nose.

It’s alright. It’s just a little stretch. It will be over soon.

But his body begins to feel panicky. She is still running. And this is the farthest, now. The farthest apart that they have ever been.

And now…it is even farther.

“Pasha,” he gasps, clutching a hand to his throat as his body doubles-up in terrible, nauseous emptiness. He grasps at the furs of his hood, tugs them around to press against his cheek. Like her fur. The only comfort and warmth available to his lone figure, surrounded on all sides by tundra that suddenly seems unbearably cold and empty.

He can feel her suffering too. But she is stronger than he is. And a part of her relishes this terrible pain. She will push them both to the point of heartbreak this time.

And besides, she has seen something up ahead. And through her pain, Otabek can feel her curiosity. She is running toward something, not just away from him.

She sees…another figure: a human! Or is it? It has a daemon, but she cannot tell what it is.

Her curiosity turns fascination. And Otabek knows that she is not going to stop until she reaches it.

He stumbles forward. He cannot bear any more distance between them. He has to be the one to give-in this time.

He begins to run toward Pasha, his heavy boots making no sound in the powdery snow. With each yard of space he covers, the nausea lifts a little more. It is like rising from the pressure of the deep ocean, with lungs burning for air. She is almost within sight; if he could only see her, he would feel so much better! But he still has to make his way around the massive snowdrift.

He becomes aware of Pasha’s excited curiosity as she reaches the human-like figure and its daemon. She sniffs their scent on the air as she looks at them. But in a moment, her curiosity turns sharply to concern; the human-thing is wounded, and there is blood on the air.

She is distracted, barely even thinking of Otabek! She is overwhelmed with concern for this stranger.

Otabek feels a strange bitter-sweetness crack at his heart. How can she think of anyone else at this moment?!

He throws himself into his run, both arms pumping furiously as he rounds the snowdrift.

He can see her now, two hundred yards away. Where the sheet of ice meets a small crack of ocean, she is crouching beside a crumpled figure. She is not even turning to look at him! She is tearing at something with her teeth.

And then Otabek feels the strangest thing he has ever felt.

All of the strength goes out of his body, and he collapses to his knees. Pasha is touching the crumpled figure beside her. She nudges at it—her-- him with her nose, and then she presses against his side with her head, and shoves him backwards toward the water.

Otabek feels an overwhelming bliss sweep through his chest, pool in his gut. It is pleasure and emotion together-- something complex and overwhelming. It draws tears instantly out of his eyes and leaves him gasping for air.

Pasha presses the stranger back, until he slumps limply over the little ledge of the ice, and falls with a splash into the water.

The intense pleasure in Otabek’s body releases, and he catches his breath on all fours, his gloved hands resting on the snow.

He looks up to see Pasha running to him, her eyes very bright.

He stands up on his knees to catch her as she throws herself at him.

“Why did you do that?” he gasps.

“He is dying.”

“We’ve seen many men die. But you never—”

“Hush.” She presses her husky body fiercely against his chest, her head pressed against his beating heart. “You have to go and see him. You’ll understand. Don’t let go of me, please…”

He wraps her in his arms and gets to his feet again, grateful that she aches for his touch as much as he does for hers. He holds her close as he hurries forward again: toward the edge of the ice where the wounded stranger fell into the sea.

He reaches the edge, and he is suddenly aware of a prickle up his spine.

Intuition.

This, he suddenly knows very certainly, is one of the most important moments of his life. There is no escaping it now: it will happen, is already happening, has happened.

This is a moment when two worlds will branch off from one stem.

Otabek holds Pasha close, and looks down into the water.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> More coming soon! =D
> 
> If you would like to read the Explicit version (eventual Otayuri and Victuuri smut), it's available here:
> 
> http://archiveofourown.org/works/12027105/chapters/27248553
> 
> :))


	2. Discovery of the Merman

Lying on a little ledge of ice, his body fully submerged in the Arctic water, is a creature of exquisite strangeness and grace.

Otabek has traveled in many worlds, and he has heard in several the legend of the mermaid. But in no world, no matter how oceanous, has he seen this creature’s like.

The creature is slender, with a wiry chest that tapers at his narrow hips into the long silver tail of a fish. His hands, splayed out above his head, have webs between their fingers, and his ribs are slitted with what can only be gills. He is covered in ornamental decoration: there are bands of seaweed tied up his upper arms, in deep red, purple, and blue-green; his ears and belly-button dangle with pearls; his neck and waist hang with strands of barnacles and shells.

His skin is white like a Svede’s or a Laplander's, and his long hair is the color of corn silk. It drifts around his graceful chest and shoulders under the water, and half-hides his face. But Otabek can see that that face is pointed and proud, with a certain quality of haughty defiance to it, even in unconsciousness. Otabek likes that face. Adores it, in fact, the moment he looks on it.

His heart gives a strange little stutter, and Pasha, feeling it, lifts her head to lick his cheek. “You see,” she says with satisfaction, “I told you you’d want to see him yourself.”

The merman’s daemon floats, also unconscious, beside the merman’s head. She is a flying fish; her wings, limply half splayed at her sides, patterned as exquisitely as a butterfly’s.

But after his initial impression of the merman’s strangeness and beauty, Otabek realizes his predicament: he is tangled in a fishing net—that must have been what Pasha was snapping her jaws at--and he is bleeding from his tail; red blood with a silvery sheen to it. His face is a little blue, like a human’s deprived of oxygen, and his gill-lungs are working hard in the water.

He must have been on the very verge of death, lying bleeding out of his natural element.

Otabek drops to his knees and sets Pasha down. He fumbles in his pack until he finds a packet of bloodmoss, and then pulls off his gloves and reaches into the icy water to lift the wounded tail. He chews the bloodmoss, then sets it on the wound, and pulls the silken Turkish sash from his waist to wrap it around the wound and the moss.

The merman begins to stir. His demon stretches out her lacy wings, and his eyelids flutter. Then he opens his eyes and looks at Otabek.

Those eyes are green as the jade of Manchuria, and they send a little shock through Otabek’s body. It is not just that the creature is beautiful; that is secondary. It is that Otabek already knows him. It is like looking into the eyes of his oldest friend, or his own newborn child. He knows him, through and through. Knows the fire and ice of his tumultuous soul, although he has never even heard his voice or learned his name.

His daemon has touched this stranger.

Sharper consciousness and awareness come into the merman’s face, and he shakes his head a little, and sits up, his torso rising out of the water. He stares at Otabek, confusion and wonder written on his face; he knows Otabek, too.

He speaks, his voice exhausted and weak. “Di desdæmon berørte miga, ikka sånten?”

Otabek shakes his head. He does not understand.

“Do you speak Inuk?” Otabek ventures, in that language, but the merman shakes his own head.

They cycle through three or four more languages before Otabek tries Ruska, and the merman’s eyes light with a spark of recognition.

“Da!” he cries. “Ruska. Yes. I can speak it.”

In their excitement, they both try to speak at once, and for a moment they still manage to communicate nothing. But then Otabek forces himself into silence.

“Your daemon touched me, didn’t she?” the merman asks.

“Da. I am sorry. She did it herself, before I could stop her.” He shoots Pasha a look, but she simply narrows her eyes at him, unabashed.

“Don’t be ashamed,” the merman says to Otabek. He looks at Pasha and gives her an approving nod. “She trusts her own instincts. My Iovzia is the same way.”

Pasha gives a pleased little growl. She steps forward toward the edge of the water, even as the flying fish daemon, Iovzia, swims toward her. She leans down, and touches her nose to the fish’s face. The two of them study each other with wide, curious eyes.

“Let me get you out of this net.” Otabek reaches into his bag again and pulls out one of his knives. He hacks at the remaining knots that keep the merman trapped. “What happened to you?”

“I was caught by humans. On a whaling vessel. Last night.” The merman’s tone turns dark and angry. “As they drew up their dinner of fishes. They had never seen a sjøbårn before. So they thought they would keep me and bring me back to Brytain as a gift to their king.”

Otabek feels a stab of anger at this. How could anyone think of keeping such a human-like creature in captivity?

“How did you escape?” he asks.

“I stole a blade and cut the net free so I could leap overboard. But I cut myself when I did it, and I was bleeding badly. I crawled up onto the snow and ice to try and numb the pain, but that was stupid. The net froze to the ground and I was trapped on land.” The merman shoves the now-loose ropes off of his body angrily. “My Iovzia could not get to me, and she was crying from the water.”

His daemon shudders at the memory, and she swims back to him to press against his chest.

“He can only breathe the air for so long,” she tells Otabek and Pasha. “I thought he would—I thought he would die.” Her voice breaks with emotion, and the merman runs a soothing hand over the silky scales of her back.

“Of course not, my love. We are much stronger than that.” But nonetheless, he raises his eyes to Pasha’s, and then to Otabek’s, and says, almost bashfully, “thanks.”

Otabek gives a nod. And then there is a rather uncomfortable moment of silence. There is no reason to continue the conversation, nothing more that politeness would dictate communicating. But the thought of saying goodbye, and parting forever as though they were mere strangers is abhorrent. They are not strangers, although they have only just met. They are intimate.

Pasha let out a little whine, betraying Otabek’s feelings. And Iovzia lifts up, her wings buzzing, and flits over the water toward her. They touch their faces together again, comforting each other with their closeness, and their two men watch them, and then look back at each other.

“What is your name?” Otabek asks.

“I am Yuri of the Plisetsky clann.”

“Then Yuri,” Otabek says, settling down to get more comfortable on the ledge of ice and snow, “tell me the story of your life.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> More coming soon! =D
> 
> If you would like to read the Explicit version (eventual Otayuri and Victuuri smut), it's available here:
> 
> http://archiveofourown.org/works/12027105/chapters/27248553
> 
> :))


	3. Seance

The sun is setting by the time Otabek returns to the research station. It does not look like much; only a transient village of yurts and fire pits, surrounded on all sides by endless wastes of snow.

They have been camped for three days, and Otabek has watched even the hardy Siberians struggle to bare the violence of the cold. The Manchurian medic is wrapped so thickly in furs that he can barely move, and the three experimental theologians from Oxford have yet to leave their yurt.

For Otabek’s part, he is not a stranger to the North. He has traveled this part of the globe before, with his teacher and his Sufi brothers, and it was during his first expedition here that his daemon settled as a husky. There is something about this landscape that suits his soul: it is inhospitable and unforgiving, accepting nothing but his greatest determination to survive.

Otabek had booked passage on the Siberian research vessel as a deckhand, with a promise to keep the sails tight, not eat too much, and disappear within a week once they reached Svalbard.

He has a few more days to practice separating from Pasha, get his equipment together, find the gate into Chitagazee, and then…

The thought of the merman interrupts his silent rehashing of his plans.

Those eyes. Like the aurora themselves; bright and chilling and ever-changing. He feels that if he looked long enough into those eyes, he could and learn all the lessons of the Qur’an without another hour of study.

Yuri Plisetsky is a dancer by birth. He carries the stories of his people in his body, passed down to him from his ancestors; the emotions of wartime, victory, peace, prosperity, and loss. He dances them for his people to help them know themselves. This is his birthright, and his genius. But there is much, much more to him even than this.

He is angry. Angry, first and foremost, at the father who abandoned him before he was born. Angry at the Blackwater Shark that killed his mother. And angry, by extension, at all the seven seas and all the land between them. There is nothing too mundane or too sacred for Yuri Plisetsky to disdain.

But Otabek knows, because of the forbidden touch that they had shared, that all this brazen spite conceals a profoundly tender and loving heart.

Yuri’s soul is as complex and rich as the light that refracts in a fire opal.

He is fascinating and moving. And Otabek, truth be told, feels more than a little shaken by their chance meeting today. He feels…different than he did this morning. Lighter. Even as the sun sets over the barren tundra, a grim and stately spectacle meant to somber the soul, Otabek feels almost…giddy.

But he has a sacred mission to complete. He can’t allow himself to become distracted by a magnificent soul, or that soul’s magnificent eyes.

Otabek forces himself back into the present moment by listening to the crunch of the snow under his boots and feeling the tiny ice crystals that breeze against his face. He must keep his mind present. Warriors do not daydream.

He draws aside the bear pelt that hangs in the doorway of one of the larger yurts, and ducks inside to trade his pack for a smaller one. Inside, some thirty Siberians are already asleep, bundled close together around the fire pit in the center and on the cots around the periphery. There is not much for them to do in the evening but hibernate like bears, saving their strength and the warmth of their bodies.

But for Otabek, there is much to be done once the encampment is quiet and peaceful.

He carries his new pack into a smaller and unoccupied yurt, one that is used for storing telescopes and star charts. He pulls a bow drill from his pack and strikes a few sparks in the pit, cups his hands around them and blows gently to nurse a small flame to life. His fingers are numb and stiff with cold, and he allows himself a few moments just to feel the pleasure of the swelling heat.

Then he unfolds a cloth full of herbs and salts, and drops a handful of the precious stuff into the fire. “For this undertaking of mine, bismalla. For all of my undertakings, bismalla. I lie down, I get up-- bismalla. I set out on the journey-- bismalla.”

He bows his forehead to the ground, and silently invites in the spirits he will need. The greatest spirit of Allah, a few relevant saints, and a handful of the local djinn, who can guide him through this hostile landscape.

He poses his question silently, and sits back on his heels to wait, as the smoke of cedarwood and burning tulips fills the yurt.

Where can I find the gate to Chitagazee?

He lets his mind go still and calm, holding the question just in his peripheral vision. Pasha sits, just as still, at his side, gazing into the fire. They remain motionless as the perfect stillness of the landscape deepens into darkness, as the stars move overhead.

It is several hours later—although time has drifted out of reality for Otabek—that Pasha suddenly pricks her ears up.  
She looks up, and all around the yurt; at the dancing firelight shadows cast by the telescopes on the round walls. She lets out a small, low growl in her throat, and licks Otabek’s hand.

He opens his eyes and looks at her, observes the sudden tension in her form.

There is something in the yurt with them.

Something that is not one of the invited spirits.


	4. Lover of the Senses

Otabek narrows his eyes.

He has trained in the art of seeing invisible things. What is visible and invisible is only a matter of attention.

He softens his mind, relaxes the hard edges that have crept into it from sitting still so long. Then he focuses—easily, gently—on the room around him.

Immediately, he sees it in his peripheral vision: there, a figure by the door.

“You can show yourself,” Otabek says quietly. “If you are a friend, I will not harm you. Come and warm yourself by the fire, if you are a creature of flesh.”

There is a light footstep, like the rustle of a dry leaf, and the figure steps forward. Its invisibility falls away, and Otabek turns his head, able to see it now full-on for what it is.

A young man. About Otabek’s own age, at least in form; although he carries a certain grace that bespeaks much more than two and a half decades of life.

Not a human, then.

He is Nipponese, with a heart-shaped face and large, cinnamon-rich eyes. He wears only a loincloth of black silk; his chest bare to the bitter cold. His daemon, a proud-looking little starling, rests on his shoulder. He clutches in his hand a broomstick made of the smooth reddish bark of a sakaki tree; the flying wood of choice for most of the Nipponese witch clans.

A witch, then.

But a strange one. Otabek has never seen a male witch before. He had thought that such a thing was impossible.

The witch smiles at him, serene and a little mischievous at the same time, as though he had just been caught cheating at a game and he is happy to be exposed.

“You must be a powerful man,” he says. He speaks in Kazakh, Otabek's native tongue, with only a touch of a Nipponese accent. “You are a mystic, I think. There are not many humans who can see me when I do not wish to be seen.”

He moves gracefully to the fire and sits down on his heels beside Otabek.

Otabek nods. “I am a shaman of the Rose Crescent. A Sufi. But I wonder why you felt a need to come upon me invisible in the first place.”  
The witch smiles again. “Truth be told, I try not to reveal myself to mortal men and women because they very often fall in love with me. It was for your protection that I hid myself. And yet I see that I need not have bothered. Your heart is already in love with someone, isn’t it? I can see it on your daemon. Her eyes are dazed and bright.”

The witch looks thoughtfully at Pasha, who lowers her head in embarrassment.

“I…I have greater plans than love,” Otabek says brashly, a little embarrassed himself.

The witch’s brow furrows for a moment in confusion. “But there is no greater purpose than love.”

“Well…maybe not. But there are greater urgencies. I am here in the North for a reason. I have something important to do. Have you come to help me? And who are you, by the way?”

“I am Katsuki Yuuri of the Hazetzu witches." He gives a little bow where he sits, and then continues, "I too am in the North for a reason. I am trying to find out what is happening to our world. The cherry blossoms bloom and fall too soon and the bees, thinking to come home to their sweet beds, return too late from their migration and starve in the spring. The seas’ currents swirl in new and unfamiliar patterns. Storms aggravate in pockets of the world’s air that have always been sweet… we witches are acutely aware of these changes, and we are unsettled. Many suspect trouble at the world’s poles: that some great and unnatural change has taken place here, and it has upset the natural order of things.

“This evening, flying over the tundra, I saw the aurora in the sky. I flew toward it, moved by its beauty. But I suddenly became aware of a warm breeze, and the glow of sunlight on my skin. How could this be? Warmth and sunlight at dusk on Svalbard? I flew closer to the aurora. And then all at once, I saw it; the silhouette of a great city, in the aurora. I could see spires, and cathedrals. I could smell moss, and mudstone. I could hear the rustle of palm trees.”

“As I hung in the air gazing at this...apparition, I felt the wind shift in our own world, and I smelled your smoke on the wind. I heard the ice crystals, and the wind whistles whispering of you. A warrior-shaman come North to ‘kill the nothingness’: a hero who needed my help. So yes, I have come to help you. Because I think that helping you will help my witches and our world. Although I do not yet know what nothingness you have come to kill, or how you will go about it.”

As the witch tells his story, Otabek’s heartbeat quickens with excitement. The gate is in the aurora! The spirits have heard him, and answered his call.

When the witch finishes speaking, Otabek bows his forehead to the ground again and murmurs a long prayer of thanks to his attendant spirits.  
Katsuki Yuuri sits contentedly beside him, sniffing at the smoke and feeling the heat of the fire with a pleasure that seems to sparkle off of him. Witches are lovers of the senses.

He waits with quiet respect for Otabek to finish his prayer. And then, when Otabek has straightened up again, he says, “Shall we go now, then? I will fly you to the place.”

“Not yet,” Otabek says. “I need a few more days to train for what I’m going to have to do there. I must practice separating from my Pasha.” He sets an unconscious hand on her back. “It will buy us a little more time once we are there.”

Katsuki Yuuri’s eyes narrow and his pretty dark eyebrows contract. “A little more time? Do you mean... that you think you will die there?”

Pasha shudders, but Otabek strokes her neck to soothe her. “It is the most likely scenario,” he says to the witch.

Otabek's face is impassive, and he tries hard to keep his heart so as well.

“But…your love?” Katsuki Yuuri asks. “The love that, I think, you have only just found. What of that?”

Otabek turns away to look into the fire and sets his jaw. “As I said,” he says quietly, “there are greater urgencies.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&biw=1440&bih=718&tbm=isch&sa=1&q=starling&oq=starling&gs_l=psy-ab.3..0i67k1l2j0l2.2461.2461.0.2695.1.1.0.0.0.0.127.127.0j1.1.0....0...1.1.64.psy-ab..0.1.126....0.XuFcGDFpof4#imgrc=nLfNyFELeE15OM:
> 
> This is what Yuuri's starling daemon looks like :D


	5. Treasures

In the next few days, the witch settles into camp, and helps Otabek and Pasha as they continue to practice separating.  


Although the researchers at first find Yuuri’s presence unsettling, he quickly gains favor among them, in part by his bashful charm, but in a greater part by bringing back fish: he flies low on his broomstick over the water and shoots them through the eyes.  


It is not getting any easier for Otabek to separate from Pasha; he still feels terrible symptoms of nausea, loneliness, and despair when she tugs at the limits of their bond. But they are managing to get farther apart every time.  


Great shamans in the Sufi tradition typically take many years to learn to function independently of their daemons. Otabek and Pasha have only been practicing for a matter of months, and they must perfect the art with only a few more days left.  


But Otabek has the benefit of a witch’s help, and that is no small matter. Witches’ daemons are born with the ability to separate from their humans: to fly high above them into the stratosphere and out to distant latitudes.  


Yuuri sends his daemon, Akira, to fly with Pasha as she runs as far as she can from Otabek. The little starling cries out encouragement as it flies above her across the tundra.  


“You must spar with me,” Otabek tells Yuuri, as their daemons run wild away from them. “I must be able to find my strength without her.”  


And so the two of them spar on the ice with wooden staffs. Without Pasha there, Otabek is easily winded, easily knocked to the ground. But he stands up again, every time.  


And he finds, much to a bittersweet feeling in his heart, that his daemon is beginning to move without him while he sleeps. She leaves his side and runs, silent and swift across the landscape. Often he feels it in his dreams. And sometimes, he sees through her eyes, and feels what it is to inhabit her furry spirit-body.  


She discovers an abandoned encampment in a cave, full of Brytish instruments of survival. There is still food there: preserved by deep freezing. But the British explorer must have perished many years ago out on the tundra, leaving his or her work unfinished.  


Pasha also finds a pile of large fish and seal bones where an armoured bear must have feasted not long ago.  


And to her great excitement, she discovers a riff of modest highlands, with hot-springs that surge up from the deep, restless gases of the inner earth. Steam rises through the cold air in columns from the hot pools of water atop these small mountains. And Pasha sits for hours as Otabek sleeps, watching the swirling of the steam.  


Her individual strength is growing, and quickly. Otabek’s is too. And together, their mysticism deepens. Otabek is eager to get on with their mission.  


But he knows that he must temper himself to wait a few days more. They have to be strong for this. They must be able to cling to life for as long as possible.  


All the same, they push themselves hard. He goes so far from Pasha that he can feel her begin to howl with anguish, tens of miles away. And she goes so far from him that he weeps like a little boy.  


Each morning, early, before the researchers rise, Otabek dresses in his furs and goes to meet Yuri Plisetsky where the ice meets the sea. They have met this way ever since their first encounter, to talk about their lives, and show each other little trinkets and treasures of their homelands. Sometimes, much to Otabek’s pleasure, they let their fingers interlock as they speak. And twice, Yuri has lifted his face to Otabek’s, and gently brushed their lips together. His cold lips sent hot chills down Otabek’s neck and spine, but Otabek did not dare pursue more; Yuri was so different from him. Did he even kiss for the same reasons? Could it be a gesture of friendship or empathy to him, rather than one of romance.  


On the fifth morning that they meet before the sunrise, Yuri surfaces with a fistful of pearls for Otabek from the deep. They are fat, iridescently golden-pink, and wonderful. The same sort that Yuri trades with Nipponese whalemen, in exchange for hunting weapons. Otabek takes them and drops them into a little pouch in his pocket, to roll between his fingers and treasure-over later. He loves these little tokens of Yuri’s world, which seems to be almost as rich and wondrous as Yuri himself.  


The two of them talk for nearly an hour about anything and everything, as they have come to love doing together. But Otabek becomes more and more aware of Pasha’s absence, as she pushes herself far away from him, back toward the distant hot springs that she had discovered at night.  


The pain and emptiness in his chest grows and gnaws at him like a hunger, and he tries his best to hide it from Yuri, but Yuri soon notices the tightness in his face.  


“It’s alright, Beka.” Yuri shoves himself up on the ledge of ice where Otabek sits, and runs his slender fingers through Otabek’s hair. “Just call her back to you. You don’t have to do this anymore. I don’t care what that stupid witch says.”  


“It’s not Yuuri that’s making us do it,” says Otabek. “We chose this for ourselves, and we’re not about to just give up on it now.” He flinches in pain.  


“Well you should give up on it,” says Yuri militantly. “It’s hurting you. I hate it.”  


Otabek smiles a little, and reaches out to run his own fingers through Yuri’s long, corn-silk hair. “You are so full of fire, for a creature of the sea.”  


“Shut up,” Yuri says petulantly. But he presses his head against Otabek’s hand, and Iovzia swims closer to Otabek.  


Their eyes meet; Otabek’s brown and deep and Yuri’s blue and electric. Otabek turns his head to look stoically out at the sea, flustered by the intensity of Yuri’s gaze.  


But Yuri rises up out of the water, pushing himself up on the shelf of ice, and guides Otabek’s chin back toward him with one slender hand. They kiss, deeper than they have before. Yuri’s hand slides over Otabek’s shoulder and onto his chest. He leaves it there, fingers curling a little against Otabek’s shirt as he feels Otabek’s strong, rapid heartbeat.  


"Otabek!" A sharp cry from the sky above startles them both. They look up, a little dazed by the chemistry and emotion of the kiss, and see Katsuki Yuuri's starling daemon, Akira, swooping down toward them. "Otabek, come quickly! You are needed at camp!"  


"What's happened?" Otabek calls, struggling to pull himself down to earth.  


"Travelers brought a mutilated human," Akira says, their genderless voice full of fear and uncertainty. "There's no time to explain. But we need your magic. You must come and help."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If anyone is curious, that abandoned camp that Pasha found was a camp of John Parry/Stanislaus Grumman, Will's father, when he first accidentally wandered into the North of Lyra's world from his own.
> 
> All of these events are taking place a few months after the end of The Golden Compass, during like the beginning-middle of The Amber Spyglass.


	6. The Prince and the Ghost Devil

A thirty-or-forty-foot zeppelin rests on the ground beside the encampment of yurts, and as Otabek nears it, running across the crunching snow with Akira flying just above him, he recognizes the imperial seal of Krasnoyarsk printed on its side.

Strange. Siberian royals in this part of the world?

“Bring him out! The shaman is coming!” Otabek hears someone yell. People are scrambling all over the camp, and there is an air of tension and fear as fires are lighted and snow is melted for water.

“Bring him wine!” calls Guang Hong, the research medic. “Keep his body warm!”

A tall, silver-haired man appears in the doorway of the zeppelin, holding another man in his arms. “Someone prepare a bed for him,” he calls. His voice is calmly authoritative, in stark contrast to the voices around him. “We will warm him up and see what the shaman can do for him.”

“This way, your highness!” A researcher bows hurriedly to the silver-haired man and his wolf daemon, and leads them toward a yurt that already has smoke rising from its center.

Otabek makes for the same yurt, and arrives in time to see the silver-haired prince laying the man in his arms on a makeshift bed of furs beside the fire. The prince pulls the thick balaclava from his own shoulders and lays it over the pale man, and then straightens up and turns to look at Otabek as Guang Hong stoops to pour wine between the unconscious man’s lips.

“Сәлем.” The prince greets Otabek in Kazakh. “I am Viktor Nikiforov, Prince of Western Siberia.”

He pulls the glove from his hand before he reaches out to shake. Otabek does the same, out of courtesy for the Siberian custom. “Your highness.” He shakes the prince’s hand, and then bows at the waist in the Siberian style. “I will do my best to heal your man.”

“Thank you. Although he is not, in fact, our man. As we flew for the land, not too far off the coast, we were signaled by a European sailing ship below us. They were fatigued and terrified…I hardly know how to describe this fear. They looked as though they felt the breath of ghosts on their necks. Their daemons’ hair stood on end, to a man. There was a creature following their ship…no one could describe it to me, but that it had no face and was like the spectre of death himself, without his robes and scythe. It drifted after them above the water, and sometimes seemed to drift just under the surface… They had managed to outrun it for nearly a week, never resting or stopping; sailing through the nights. But there was such fatigue on ship early this morning that they slowed, and the thing caught up to them at last.” Viktor Nikiforov looks down at the red-haired, olive-skinned young man on the floor. “And it…preyed-upon this boy before they could get away from it again.”

“It preyed upon him,” Otabek repeats. He already knows what that means, if this spectral monster was what he suspects it was.

He can see no sign of the man’s daemon. Otabek hopes against hope that it is mouse or insect formed, and merely tucked unconscious inside the man’s furs. But there is something eerie and unnerving about the man, even in his sleep, and Otabek’s suspicions are deepening.

“Does this man have a daemon?” he asks Viktor bluntly.

Viktor shakes his head grimly. “That is the part of him that it preyed upon.”

“I see.”

Guang Hong, still kneeling at the man’s head, recoils with visceral horror. “Blessings upon his poor soul,” he gasps.

Otabek sinks to his knees beside the fire, and reaches out to feel the man’s forehead.

Others are beginning to crowd into the yurt around them: both the researchers and members of Viktor’s well-dressed entourage from the zeppelin. All stare at the daemon-less man with some combination of pity and morbid fascination. Near the front stands a young woman in the habit of a Roman nun. Her large, violet eyes are fixed on the sufferer with such an intensity of grief and anguish that Otabek can only imagine she must be his sister.

“I know what did this to him,” Otabek says to Viktor after a long moment of thought. “But I did not know that they had made their way into our world. This is very grim news. If there is one, there are almost certainly more of them.”

A shiver of fear passes through the room.

“We need not panic,” Otabek says quickly, sensing the beginnings of a hysteria coming on. “Only to institute a watch. And your highness, if I may be so bold, it is my recommendation that you postpone your travels for a little while, and stay with us in our encampment.” He bows his head modestly. “I have the tools and the knowledge to fight these creatures, and it would be my honor to protect you and your courtiers.”

Viktor returns the bow. “Thank you. I will consider that offer. But it is unlikely that we can stay for very long. We are en route to the wedding of the bear king Iorek Byrnison to his great warrior Jora Grislasdottir. It would not do to arrive late.”

“As your highness wishes.”

Otabek inclines his head again.

The prince is an interesting character: tall and slender, with prematurely silver hair that hangs across his young, almost girlishly-beautiful face. His body language speaks of a normally carefree and cheerful person, but there is sadness in his eyes. His daemon moves with uncommon swiftness and grace, but there are shades of blue in the white-silver of her coat. His courtiers seem to respect him and even love him, but not to fear him. He is kind to them, then. And he took this mutilated European man into his zeppelin, and carried him in his own arms into the yurt to be healed.

Compassion is rare in a man of power.

What is more, this prince is a friend of the bears. And they do not befriend humans unless they recognize in them great strength, integrity, and intention.

Otabek will gladly serve this prince as he would serve a prince of his own homeland.

He turns back to the daemon-less man, and gently pulls his furs down to check the pulse in his neck. He finds a chain on his neck, and tugging on it, finds a wooden cross at the end. A Catholic missionary, most likely. Come North on another foolish quest to evangelize the bears. What a terrible fate for an idealist, this daemon-less oblivion that he will face.

Guang Hong guides his mouth open to look at his tongue.

He exchanges a glance with Otabek that communicates their mutual conclusion: the man’s body is functioning normally. But Otabek knows all too well, from spirit visions and scrying, what becomes of the poor souls preyed-upon by spectres. Without the daemon, the body loses the will to live. And after wandering with no sense of place, confused and suffering for days or weeks, the victim succumbs to dehydration or starvation, and curls up to die.

Guang Hong pulls a kit of needles from his pack, and Otabek can sense him relaxing his mind, settling it quietly into his intention of healing. But precise and powerful as Manchurian medicine is, Otabek does not think that the needles will do much to help this man.

There may be nothing that can help this man.

“Medicus.” The violet-eyed Roman nun takes a step forward. “Exorcizamus te, frater meus est. Dei cultor est fratris mei. Et liberabo est spiritus ejus ab aethere diaboli.”

She is addressing Otabek, and he shakes his head apologetically to show that he does not understand.

"She wants you to perform an exorcism," a man from Viktor's party translates. "She says that you must free her brother's spirit from the devil-ghost."

Otabek considers for a moment. In fact, an exorcism may be their best option at the moment. If the spectre has somehow...captured the man's daemon, and exerts some hold on him through it, then they may be able to break the spectre's influence and free the daemon.

He nods, and speaks to the translator. "Tell her that I will do as she suggests. Only let her know that I am untrained in the Catholic ceremony and mine must be in the Sufi way."

The Roman woman nods when this message is passed along, and Otabek can see from the desperation in her eyes that her faith is much less important to her, in this moment, than her love for the man on the floor.

She turns to look at the men gathered around, and waves her hands at the door. "Vade. Ut operandum relinquit. Vade!"

Her meaning is plain enough, and both scientists and kingsmen shuffle for the door and leave the yurt, their daemons at their heels.

Viktor Nikiforov, too, turns to leave, but she stops him and curtseys apologetically, as though to say, "Not you, your highness." And so he turns back to watch, with pity in his eyes, as she kneels on the floor between Otabek and Guang Hong, at her brother's side.

 

"Michele," she murmurs, brushing a hand over his cheek. "Aye, Deus et Maria..." Her little white dove daemon perches on her shoulder and buries his face in her neck.

 

Otabek withdraws for the moment, as Guang Hong begins to unwrap the man's furs, and to position his thin silver needles carefully in his naked chest. He will perform the exorcism when Guang Hong is done, and with any luck, something will come of something.

 

Akira has perched on the lantern hook on one of the yurt’s central beams. They watch the man on the floor with pity, and occasionally glance up curiously at the prince’s wolf daemon, who sits by the door, quietly waiting for her human.

 

Viktor, in turn, seems to be interested in Akira, as his eyes keep trailing back to them to linger, longer and longer each time.

 

“Your daemon is…exquisite,” he says quietly to Otabek as Guang Hong works. “Her...his? feathers are like a sky of stars…I have never seen his equal.”

 

Akira blinks, looking completely nonplussed and very pleased. They ruffle their feathers a little, and then bashfully tuck their head under their wing.

 

“Thank you, but they are not mine,” says Otabek. “They are the daemon of the witch Katsuki Yuuri, who…”

 

But at that moment, Yuuri himself lands on the snow outside the yurt. He hovers over the ground and swings gracefully off of his broom before he runs, barefoot in the snow, to the door of the yurt and peers inside urgently. "Otabek, did you find th--"

 

He breaks off in the middle of his sentence when he sees Viktor, and he stands blinking and staring rather dumbly for a few seconds before Otabek decides he had better make some sort of introduction.

 

"Erm, Yuuri, this is Prince Viktor Nikiforov of Western Siberia. Your highness, this is Katsuki Yuuri of the Hazetzu Witches."

 

"Katsuki Yuuri." Viktor takes a step forward to lift one of Yuuri's hands, and bows to kiss it. He raises his eyes to Yuuri's and smiles; a small, sweet, perhaps-slightly-broken smile. "I am enchanted to meet you."

 

Rosy pink rises in Yuuri's cheeks like a flood from a broken dam, and he hastily closes his mouth, drops his gaze, and dips a shaky bow-curtsey.

 

Viktor turns back to Otabek, his eyes suddenly very bright and a little wild.

 

"Otabek, was it? You know what, I am going to stay here for a while. Thank you for your offer of protection. I think we really ought to take you up on it. We really shouldn't be moving abroad, with such monsters roaming. No, you were absolutely right. We must stay here."

 

Yuuri's face remains impassive, his eyes lowered to the floor. But across the room, Akira lets out a little squawk of pleasure.


	7. Tallow

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Yuuri breaks Viktor from his solitude.

The Russian prince’s chamber in the zeppelin is decorated as lavishly as a room in the Winter Palace itself. The pattern on the ornate red wallpaper matches the pattern on the plush red chairs, and a golden brocade graces everything from the curved ceiling, to the trunk and feet of the little dining table under the crystal chandelier, where Yuuri and Viktor sit, at dinner.  


“And the shaman?” Viktor asks, setting his wine glass delicately down on the tablecloth. “What is his business in the North?”  


It is the first time in nearly an hour that Viktor has wanted to know about anything but Yuuri; Yuuri’s clan, Yuuri’s home, Yuuri’s magic, Yuuri’s purpose in the North, Yuuri’s daemon, Yuuri’s lovers, Yuuri’s travels, Yuuri’s past, Yuuri’s favorite foods… It is an enormous relief to Yuuri to get to think about someone else for a moment.  


“He comes to enter the world in the aurora, and make war on the spectres there.” Yuuri says. “It is the way of his Order to travel between the worlds, and work to balance the energies between them. The people in the aurora world are suffering; the spectres have preyed on nearly every adult, and left the children orphans. With time, the spectres will drift into other worlds, as they are already drifting into ours. Otabek wants to kill them, and he believes that he has a weapon to do it. But it is a dangerous task, and he does not expect to survive it. The spectres will see him, and at once go in search of his daemon. And you have already seen what they do to daemons. They eat them alive, and leave their humans or witches as empty shells.”  


“So it is a Jihad, of sorts, that he takes,” Viktor says thoughtfully. “But a suicide mission.”  


“It is a shame,” says Yuuri. “Human lives are all too short as it is. And he is very young. I have tried to dissuade him. But he is a warrior. Much more a warrior at heart than a mystic, I think. And I cannot know his destiny better than he. So, so, let him go.”  


Yuuri glances out of the long, curved windows that cover the wall on the other side of the cabin, framed by heavy curtains, and gazes for a few moments at the darkened tundra.  


Viktor, meanwhile, gazes at Yuuri.  


On the floor, a little ways from the table, their two daemons sit together, speaking very quietly and casting secretive glances at their humans. Yuuri knows that Akira will not tell him, later, what they were discussing. Daemons often speak in confidence with one another, and agree to keep their secrets from their witches or humans. There are secrets between daemons that humans and witches could never understand, just as daemons cannot understand the pleasures of the flesh that humans and witches share with one another…  


And right about now, Yuuri suspects that Prince Viktor Nikiforov is hoping to do some things with him that their daemons will never understand or even want to.  


There are different forces at play in Yuuri in this moment; normally, he is shy, and easily embarrassed. But under a heated gaze like Viktor’s, he finds that he is able to become a different sort of witch altogether. The wicked temptress inside of him raises her head, under a gaze like that, and begins to dance.  


He lets his eyes snap suddenly onto Viktor, catching him staring, and he smiles.  


“Tell me, your Highness,” he says, “have you ever heard the story of the dawn-cursed prince, and the witch that saved him from his solitude?”  


Viktor shakes his head, his lips parted slightly with the surprise of Yuuri’s sudden glance.  


“It is a story well-known in this part of the world. There was once a prince who lived in the North,” Yuuri says, dropping his voice to something a little smoother and darker, “who lived alone in a castle made of ice. He had lived so for a hundred years, or so it seemed. But time was different then. So who can say how long it really was? He was young, but growing older. Handsome, but just beginning to fade. And all he had ever known was solitude, and grandeur, and ice." 

Yuuri pauses to take another sip of the warm, saffron-infused wine. 

"This prince had been cursed from infancy. Every day, at dawn, his form was changed into that of a great white bear. His people, terrified of him, had sent him far away to live in isolation. And no one had ever known his heart, seen him for the good man that he was. Now one day, a wounded witch fell from the sky into a snowdrift near the castle. The prince rushed out to help her, dug her from deep in the snow with his great paws, and carried her to his fire to warm her. He was deeply touched by her vitality, her beauty, and her knowledge of the wide world. 

"She thought he was an armoured bear, sent to live in exile. And he did not tell her differently, because he was ashamed of his truth. He was ashamed to be a grown man who had never known human intimacy. And so he courteously prepared a room for her in the castle, and went to sleep in his own chamber. But the witch suspected that something was amiss; he did not behave much like most armoured bears that she had known; he had sat at table with her to eat dinner, and sipped wine like a man. And even more strangely, he wore no armour at all. So that night, the witch slipped out of her chamber and through the empty halls of the ice castle, a candlestick in her hand. She silently opened the door to the prince's chamber, and there she saw him; a beautiful human man, asleep. His face was kind, but lined with sadness. And she knew at once that she loved him. So she went to his bedside, and let the tallow from her candle drip onto his chest. 

"At once, his curse was broken, and he awoke to find himself changed back into a man for good. The witch embraced him, and they married, and together they road the winds on her broomstick to a kingdom East of the sun and West of the moon, where they made many friends, and lived happily thereafter." 

Viktor smiles a little, and the sadness in it comes near to breaking Yuuri's heart. 

"That is a beautiful story," he says. "And you tell it well. I would be glad, Yuuri, to listen to you speak forever." 

Yuuri smiles, and raising his hand delicately, reaches out for the prince's cheek. 

Viktor's eyes widen a little, pleasantly surprised, and he rests his own hand against Yuuri's, holding it in place. 

Viktor is an extraordinarily beautiful creature. He is a _special_ human, no doubt about that. But he is not special because of his birthright or his power. He is kind, and generous, and he gives—to his people, and to Yuuri in this moment, a deep brilliance of love from his very soul.  


And rather against his will, Yuuri feels a throb of emotion in his chest.  


This is the sort of human a witch has to watch out for. The sort who could make her want to give up the rush of the rain and the stars and go to live among the humans.  


But that’s a problem to ponder at another time.  


"Witches," Yuuri says quietly. "We know solitude when we see it. Will you let me break yours, your highness?" 

"Yes," Viktor whispers, those blue eyes full of vulnerable and eager fire. 

Yuuri stands up, and cupping Viktor’s chin in his hand, guides the prince to his feet as well. He backs him up against the bed, and Viktor slides back onto it, his eyes fixed on Yuuri the whole time. Yuuri climbs onto the bed after him, and pulls the chords so that the thick canopies fall around them, submerging them in the almost total darkness of the silken bed.  



	8. The Cutting Shards

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Otabek takes precautions.

The dawn cracks and spills over the snowscape.  


The light falls across the encampment; the Siberian zeppelin and the cluster of research yurts.  


In the medical yurt, the light that comes in through the open flap on the ceiling finds the shaman, the medic, and the nun still awake, clustered around the daemonless missionary beside the fire.  


The yurt is smoky with the remnants of Guang Hong’s moxa treatment and Otabek’s sandalwood summoning of the daemon. But neither science nor magic had yielded anything upon the missionary, who still lies as despondent as the snow.  


He had slept at times, fitfully, in the night. But mostly he had lain with his eyes open, looking blankly up at the ceiling. More than once, he had twisted with some strange detached agony, and called out the name of Pacifica.  


Sara has been praying at his head for hours, a rosary clutched in her fist and her little dove daemon pressed to her breast. He gives little cooing sighs of grief, and sometimes he too calls out the other daemon’s name. Otabek pities them, because surely the two daemons must have been playmates all their lives, and the dove feels a grief of his own as acutely as he feels Sara’s, and she feels his too.  


But as the sun rises, Guang Hong raises his tired eyes to Otabek’s, and shakes his head very slightly.  


“I can see no hope,” he says quietly in Kazakh. “This man’s daemon…we cannot summon her, we cannot scry her…we cannot even sense her. She has gone back into the _wu_. The empty center from which daemons come.” He draws a breath, deeply troubled but too tired to fully show it. “I did not know this was possible. It is _not_ possible. It is against the way. And yet, so it is. The hungry ghost has taken her for good.”  


Otabek nods grimly.  


“We must tell the holy woman.”  


“I will tell her.” Guang Hong glances unhappily at Sara. “I speak a little English, and so does she. You go and tell the camp.”  


“Very well.”  


Otabek rises from the floor, dons his boots and furs, and goes out.  


*

  


“It’s time, Otabek,” Pasha says, as soon as they are alone.  


Crystals of snow blow off the ground and swirl up around them as they walk to the large yurt where many of their party are still asleep.  


“Don’t think of Yuri,” she says fiercely, as soon as he begins to. “You’ll only make this harder on us. We came here with a job to do, and now we’ve seen for ourselves how important it is. We’ve got to go.”  


“You’re right.”  


Otabek does not like it. Does not want to leave these people behind, with spectres drifting through this world now, too. Yuri, the nun…Katsuki Yuuri, Guang Hong, the prince… _Yuri_ …  


“We’ll leave them with the shards, like we planned,” Pasha says. “They’ll be safe. And then we go, and we find the root, and we attack at it. “  


“Yes. Alright.”  


Otabek ducks through the flap into the large yurt where many of the researchers are still asleep, embers burning low in the fire pit.  


He can hear people speaking in the yurt next door, and the clink of pots and pans as they prepare breakfast.  


He kneels on his own cot and opens a chest beside it. He pulls out a small metal box, carved and glass-jeweled in the Kazakh way. He pulls off the cold metal lid, and looks down at the shards of metal inside.  


They look like the tiny fragments of a broken mirror.  


But they are much more than that. And they are worth more, perhaps, than all the treasures of the Silk Road put together.  


Otabek slips the bag into his coat and goes out.  


He tramps across the snow again, and knocks at the entrance to the prince’s enormous zeppelin. A sleepy courtier lets him inside, and after repeatedly explaining that the prince is still abed, and finding no surrender in Otabek, the man grudgingly directs him through the richly-decorated entrance room and up a flight of stairs to the prince’s chamber.  


Otabek knocks on the door, and the prince’s muffled voice calls to him to come in.  


Viktor’s voice sounds extremely cheerful, and as soon as Otabek opens the door, he sees why.  


Viktor is lying in bed, entwined with Katsuki Yuuri. They have one thin sheet over them, and one of the canopy curtains of the large bed pulled back to bask in the heat and glow of the crackling fire in the grate. They are both flushed with warmth and trust and adoration, and Yuuri is licking his fingers; it appears they have been gazing into each others eyes and feeding each other chocolatl.  


Otabek almost laughs, for a moment, as he imagines the visceral disgust that would be on Yuri's face if he saw this scene. 

“Otabek! Pasha!” Viktor cries joyfully. “Welcome to my room. Please come in and have a seat!”  


He gestures to the ottoman by the fire, which is currently occupied by Makka and Akira, who sit preening each other. But at Viktor’s gesture, the two daemons dislodge themselves and go to continue their preening behind the bed.  


Yuuri has gone scarlet with embarrassment, and noticing this, Viktor gallantly pulls a thicker blanket over him.  


“I’m very sorry to intrude like this,” Otabek says. He does not sit down, but instead pulls the little box from inside his furs. “But I have something important to give you both.”  


He opens the box and pours out a small pile of the metal shards onto the bedside table.  


Viktor sits up and reaches for them curiously, but Otabek stops his hand.  


“Have a care, your highness. See that you don’t touch any edges. The slightest pressure could take your fingertips off.”  


Viktor looks up at him curiously. “What are they?”  


“They are fragments from the forging of the Subtle Knife, or _Æsahættr_ , “the God-killer”. It was forged in Chitagazee, where the spectres originate. It can cut through anything, and it is the only weapon we know of that can kill them. A mere touch from one of these fragments, and a spectre will be torn apart.  


“I want you, your highness, to give a fragment to each of your courtiers. And Yuuri, give one to each person in the party here. Attach them to their weapons. If spectres should come here, I want you all to be able to fight. You can break them up further if you need to, and make more weapons: even a single particle will do the job.”  


The bliss is fading quickly from Viktor’s face, to be replaced by concern.  


“I will do as you ask. But do you mean to go now on your journey?”  


“I have waited too long already.”  


“Will you not take some food?” Viktor gets up, absent-mindedly wrapping a silken sheet around his mid-section. “I have food, and spirits. Let me--”  


“No. Thank you. I have had my pack prepared for days. All I needed here was to give you the shards.”  


Yuuri watches him, silent and serious, sitting up in the bed. After a few moments, he says, “I will protect your daemon, Otabek. To the last arrow in my quiver.”  


Otabek does not know what to say, so he simply bows to Yuuri.  


“But are you going to leave _now_?” Viktor asks anxiously.  


“I have one more goodbye to say before I do.”


	9. What the Body Does Alone

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Otabek says goodbye.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Note: This chapter contains consensual kissing and removing of shirts

The climb is steep. More than once, Otabek nearly slips on the layer of ice beneath the snow.  
He carries Yuri in his arms, bridal-style.  


Pasha runs along easily beside them, her husky body agile in a landscape like this.  


All around them, the clear mid-morning light illuminates sharply the vast, barren landscape, all the way to the stark sea. A fresh snow glitters under Otabek’s boots, but the sky is clear and blue.  


Ahead of them, steam rises from the volcanic hot-springs, swirling in the sharp cold of the air. Otabek climbs toward it. He has seen that steam before, but only in lucid dreams, through Pasha's eyes.  
It had been her suggestion to bring Yuri here.  


"You could be together, in the same element," she had said. "In the hot water. You could hold each other as you want to...not just interlock fingers or sit for a few minutes on the ice ledge."  


And Otabek wants that. He wants to wrap his arms around Yuri and hold him with his whole body.  


Yuri is oddly quiet, one arm wrapped around Otabek's neck and the other holding Iovzia against his stomach in a pitcher of water. He barely speaks until they reach the steaming pools of volcanic water.  


The steam has melted away the snow from the rocks around the pools, leaving a few yards of basalt and slick volcanic glass. They are on the peak of an inferior mountain, and all around them, greater mountains rise jagged and formidable.  


Otabek crosses carefully over the bared minerals of the mountain, and crouches beside a little pool to lower Yuri into it. Yuri inhales sharply as he feels the heat of the water on his fin, and Otabek pauses.  


"Is it too hot?"  


"No, it will feel excellent. Put me in."  


Otabek does, and Yuri lets out a sigh of pleasure. He dumps Iovzia unceremoniously out of the pitcher into the water next to him, and they both dunk under a few times, looking at each other excitedly.  


Otabek watches, endeared, as he realizes that feeling warm is a thrilling new experience for them. Pasha lets out a little whine of tenderness.  


Yuri looks up at Otabek, his large, powerful eyes alight in his pretty face.  


"Alright, now you get in here too," he says. And then, daringly, "But first, you should probably take your shirt off.”  


Otabek's heart skips a beat, and his stomach leaps. It is cold in the open air, and even a few minutes in it unprotected would be dangerous. But how could he say no to an order like that?  


He does it; stripping away layer after layer of furs until he is shirtless, his muscled arms and chest bared in the arctic sunlight. Then he unties his sash, and strips out of his boots and socks. He crouches down and swings himself into the pool in just his linen pantaloons.  


A pink glow blossoms over Yuri's cheeks as Otabek approaches him, shirtless, through the water. A little nervously, but with a great effort not to show it, he strips off the bands of seaweed and jagged shells that decorate his neck and arms, the pearls from his ears, and lays them all beside the pool. He is as close to naked as he can be, and Otabek adores him for the gesture. There he is, as wonderful as a living creature can possibly be, and looking at Otabek with such clear, jagged tenderness.  


"Beka," he says fiercely, and a moment later, Otabek's arms are wrapped around his waist, pulling their bodies together. Yuri's arms wrap around Otabek's neck, and they melt against each others’ mouths.  


At the edge of the pool, Pasha lets out a resigned sigh. Like most daemons, she finds kissing to be rather silly and tedious. She reaches out with her face to exchange a few quiet words with Iovzia, and then scoops the little fish up in her jaws and carries her, ever-so-gently, to another pool some yards away.  


The minutes that follow are the sweetest that Otabek has yet known.  


One of Otabek’s arms is wrapped around Yuri’s slender waist, holding him up out of the water. Holding their bodies together.  
Their lips are pressed together, one with the heat, and one with each other.  


But after a few minutes, the tenderness peaks, and something in Otabek’s chest starts to ache.  


He kisses him for only another moment, bearing through the pain, and then pulls out of the kiss and rests his head against Yuri’s, holding him wrapped in his arms.  
They breathe heavily together for several moments, but they are two separate beings once again.  


Otabek breathes into Yuri’s neck, his warm, damp hair. He feels Yuri’s pulse, wild, under his lips.  


Yuri speaks first. “I won’t tell you again to stay,” he says.  


Otabek says nothing. Because if Yuri did tell him again to stay, he doesn’t know that he would be able to refuse.  


Otabek smiles. “Well, we are in agreement there.”  


“It doesn’t matter anyway,” says Yuri, rather forcefully. “We probably couldn’t have been together. We’re different creatures. We live different lives. So it doesn’t matter.”  


His voice breaks on the last word.  


Otabek holds him closer instinctively. He feels a shiver, and a thought rises through his mind, a sad and strange thought that seems to come from outside of him, like a prophecy.  


_Not all true lovers are meant to be together._  


“Don’t forget to use the knife shards I gave you,” Otabek says. “You may need them quickly. I don’t know how long it will take for the spectres--”  


He stops abruptly. A tingle runs up his arm, and knocks the breath from his lungs. As he spoke, he had let go of Yuri and dropped one of his hands into the water at his side. He looks down.  


Iovzia swims, graceful and silent, beside them. She is brushing her cheek against Otabek’s hand.  


Yuri is reacting, as Otabek had reacted weeks ago, when Pasha reached out with her nose and nudged Yuri, breaking a taboo as powerful as they come.  


Yuri’s hand is over his heart, and he gasps, bending over slightly. Stinging, and moved.  


*

  


It is dusk, and the last of the aurora lights up the sky.  


Otabek is climbing.  


There is light in his eyes, and he has to close them. But his hands and feet find ledges and holds in the air. It is as though a part of the other world is hovering, just behind the lights. It is solid. He wedges his boot-toes into crevices.  


Far below him, snow swirls off the ground and rips this way and that in the early night wind.  


He raises his head to the strange, bright tear in the sky above him. His eyes are wet: he cannot see. There is a cityscape, bright and mired and indistinct. He feels a warm breeze on his face.  


He can feel all of his body, somehow amplified. The strength of his arms and legs, his core. The beat of his pulse. The ache in his chest, the sting in his eyes.  


He feels as though he is a body alone now. He has left everything else behind. He cannot sense Pasha: not a single beat of her daemon heart; they are too far away from each other.  


For a moment, the aurora is all around him. It is such a bright, bright green.  


Then he is standing on a ledge. He is looking at a hot noontide sun over Chitagazee.  


He can turn around and see the stars. He can see the snow. The aurora is the color of Yuri Plisetsky’s eyes. He cannot look at it.  


There are tears unfreezing on his cheeks.  


He unslings the warrior’s staff from his back.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm on tumblr :) 
> 
> basilique.tumblr.com


	10. Viktor's Value

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Yuuri prepares for battle.

Yuuri rises when Akira calls.

He feels them tugging urgently at his consciousness. “Yuuri, Yuuri! Wake up! They are coming.”

Yuuri sits up in the bed, instantly alert. Lifting the canopy aside, he slides his feet to the floor and goes to the window as Akira raps on it. He opens it, and Akira hops onto his hand.

“It’s alright.” He runs a soothing hand over Akira’s ruffled, celestial feathers. “We’re ready for them.”

He turns and lifts the bed canopy again, so that the pale pre-dawn light falls onto Viktor, tangled in the silky sheets on the far side of the bed. Viktor lies on his back, his legs and arms sprawled out carelessly across the bed, his mouth open in deep sleep. He looks so innocent, and so very human.

“Let’s drug him,” says Yuuri.

Akira does not argue with him. The two of them share a soul, after all, and Akira knows Yuri’s reasons.

Yuuri pulls a pack out from under the bed and extracts a dark green, mossy-textured tincture. He pulls the stop from it and holds it up for Akira, who beats their wings a few times to hover over it, and dips their beak into it.

As Yuuri retrieves his quiver of arrows from the far wall, Akira hovers over the sleeping prince and lowers their beak. Carefully, precisely, they let three drops fall into Viktor’s open mouth.

At the foot of the bed, Makka, who had been beginning to stir, adjusts himself to let his wolf’s head rest on his paws. His ears begin to twitch with dreams again.

Yuuri slings his quiver over his shoulder and reaches out for Akira. But at that moment, there is a firm knock on the door.

“Your Highness.” Yuuri recognizes the voice of Yakov, the warrior captain from Viktor’s entourage. He speaks urgently. “The ghost creatures are approaching the camp. You must prepare your person for a full blown battle, my lord. Are you--”

Yuuri opens the door. “His Highness is still asleep,” he says primly. “He will not be inclined to do battle today.”

Yakov stares at Yuuri blankly for a moment. He is already bundled in furs, a musket in his hand.

“You misunderstand Siberians, witch,” he says at last. “We select our crown princes by tournament. Viktor Nikiforov is the most skilled fighter in Siberia, and the greatest warrior does not sleep through a battle like the one about to come. It’s not a matter of will-he-nill-he.”

“Of course he is the best,” says Yuuri, pride rising in his voice. “But valor does not kill a spectre. They feed on it, as they feed on noble intentions, determination, compassion, love, agency. I do not care how valuable he is to you as a warrior, he is more valuable to me as a man.”

Yakov opens his mouth, disoriented and angry, but Yuuri is already moving to the window. “There’s no time to lose,” he says. “You will not be able to wake the prince. So gather your men and take to the tundra; fight from a distance for as long as you can. I will defend you from the skies.”

He takes his broomstick from where it rests against the wall, throws open the window, and launches himself out and upward.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Note: 
> 
> A very brilliant reader just pointed out to me that the two versions of this fic (explicit and non-explicit) are rather like two worlds within the HDM ethos: two world that are similar, and exist in parallel, but are at the same time, quite fundamentally different. Thanks for the insight @songofsunset, and I'm going to pretend I did that on purpose! ;)


	11. The Spectres of Cittàgazze

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Otabek enacts the plan.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: Brief description of a dead body (not one of the characters)

Otabek swings his staff, pivoting on his heel to clear the space behind him. 

Sweat is beginning to bead on the back of his neck: he has cut down three courtyards full of spectres. An orange-golden sun hangs high overhead, casting the beginnings of afternoon shadows on the Mediterranean city. His furs lie abandoned on the threshold of the world, and he wears only loose cotton pants. 

All around him is a tiered complex of abandoned courtyards; jungle columns framing cracked checkerboard floors, through which mosses and weeds are breaking. He seems to be on the outskirts of the city: to the South, he can see large buildings, and a tower that stands tall and imposing. In the other direction, distant cloud forest and pastures.

There are no people anywhere in sight. 

But there are certainly spectres. The landscape is crawling with them; there is one at least every four yards. They move among the courtyards, drifting aimlessly like fog above a lake. 

Otabek stops to drink from a lion’s mouth fountain, which is still flowing despite the city’s emptiness. He splashes water over his face and down his bare back. He drinks again, deeply; he has seen water alone keep men and women alive through weeks of fasting, and give them strength for physical training when all other wells of energy have dried up. 

He has already pushed down several rushes of adrenaline. When he first saw the specters so close, he felt it. And when his staff slashed through the first ephemeral body, and its nothingness had been torn by the fragments of the subtle knife. He had felt A wave of affirmation as the tour inspector had vanished. But the quickening of his pulse and the rush of excitement or fear will only make him tired when it wears off. He needs to save that for the last push.

He feels Pasha’s absence. Already, he is longing for her. Aching to share the newness of these sites and smells. And under that ache is another, more useless than the first: Yuri Plisetsky already feels like a dream of a mirage.

Otabek runs down a set of steps into another courtyard, and cuts down the specters there quickly and mechanically, trying to find his center again. He slashes his way through a fourth courtyard, and then through a little stand of trees. A man’s body is lying, partially decomposed, against a trunk. Otabek averts his eyes quickly. He holds his breath until he is away from the stench of death.

The courtyard through the trees is thicker with spectres than the ones before it, and he concentrates on cutting down as many as possible with each swipe of his staff. He turns with it, keeping lightness and inertia so that his muscles need barely work. Every moment of physical and mental training that he has ever undergone is in use right now, and the satisfaction of that drives him into a powerful meditative state, through which he twirls and slashes, his breathing rate barely changed, for perhaps two hours. 

Then, as he stops to drink from another fountain, a realization comes upon him.

The tide of the specters is beginning to shift.

Instead of aimless drifting in all directions, there is an eastward motion across the landscape. The specters are beginning to move toward the opening into his world. And suddenly, with that uniformity of movement, Otabek can see just how many of them there are.

An eerie whiteness oozes from the distant forests. 

What he had thought was fog over the pasturelands is now moving toward him.

And from the direction of the tower, they spill like the cresting of a wave.

Otabek’s stomach twists. This is not going to go as he planned.

 _How can there be so many of them? How? Where are they all_ coming from? _The corpses in this city are still decomposing. How can such a plague of the supernatural have swept so quickly over this world?_

His head suddenly spins with a horrible thought. Panic threatens. 

_What if someone like him let them in? Someone trying to do something good?_

They have already sensed Pasha. Feeling blindly along his connection to her, they are already turning for his world. He has endangered his whole party: how will they defend themselves, when not just a small battalion, but an unyielding and untiring ocean of spectres crashes over them? 

Otabek runs for the opening. He should not run. He should save that strength. But he thinks of Yuri, and he has to. 

He slashes ferociously at the spectres that have already reached it, before they can get through. 

He must not think of Yuri anymore. His heart and mind are flying out of his control, hammering and wild. He needs to stay grounded, to stay here. To catch every spectre before it goes through. 

But hours pass, and soon they are coming thick and fast. He cannot cut down every single one. One at a time, they are slipping past him. 

_Pasha_ , he thinks desperately, trying to locate her and send her his thoughts. _Come. We’ll have to let them get us here. Maybe we can keep them in Chitagazzee…_

But he cannot feel her, and he knows that wherever she is, she cannot hear him. 

He starts instead to pray as he fights. He barely breathes the words, to save his air. But he moves his lips and fills his thoughts with all the devout desperation that he feels. 

But the spirits in this world are unfamiliar to him, and the only energy he can feel around him is the empty, void-like energy of the spectres. 

Night falls. The temperature drops. His staff feels heavy in his hands, and he is desperately thirsty. He has to pause for a moment to drink from the oil skin on his leg. As he does it, he feels a chill as the spectres press past him, brushing his skin. 

In the darkness, he can no longer see what he is fighting. But he knows that they are there. They will keep pressing forward all night, and through the next day, and on and on and on. 

His body is tiring, and quickly. He should rest, and sleep for a little while. But to do so would mean letting the stream of specters go untapped onto Svalbard.

No. He will not sleep again as he is. He will have to stay in this very spot, swinging his staff like this, until one of these creatures finds Pasha. He will sleep once he is a solid ghost, like Michele the missionary. 

His heart sinks with true despair.

 _This was not worth it._ His life will barely make a dent. It would take an army of shamans… where are they all _coming from?_

 _I’m sorry_ , he thinks frantically to Pasha. _I’m so sorry. I thought… I thought we could do more here. I thought it would be worth it, I swore…_

And they had. At eight years old, they had sworn themselves to protect the balance between the worlds. Sworn it with a solemnity and certainty far beyond their years. 

With each sweep of his staff, a handful of specters were gone. And that was good. It was.

But it wasn’t worth the lives it was going to cost.

Otabek slashes harder, as hard as he can, and suddenly his foot slips from the ledge. 

He overbalances and falls forward. He rolls to catch himself, but he is on slope, and his body keeps rolling for several moments in the darkness. He has the presence of mind to hold onto his staff, but that leaves him with only one hand to try and right himself. He bumps against a stone and tries grab ahold of it, but he misses and the slope is steep now, and sandy. He is sliding down on his side, reaching desperately for something to grab onto. But there is nothing, and it is several more moments before he is finally tossed, winded, onto flat ground. 

His exhausted body resists, heavy and bruised and sand-scratched, as he pulls himself to his feet again. He can see nothing but thick blackness around him. He doesn’t even know if he can find his way back to the ledge. He will have to try to climb back up the way he fell…he reaches for the sandy slope…and freezes. 

There is something _behind him_. 

He can hear it breathing. It is close. 

He tenses his body, his grip tightening on the staff. 

But then the thing behind him _speaks_. A voice materializing from the darkness, and with a touch of sarcasm in it. “You are going to need to make a different plan.”


End file.
